Memo to McConnell: You bought him, you own him

Supposedly Mitch McConnell is working behind the scene to end the shutdown. Time Magazine notes that he “boasted in 2014 that he was “the guy that gets us out of shutdowns” — and that he “has a long record of cutting the Gordian knot of legislative gridlock, especially, like now, when it’s a crisis of the GOP’s own making.”

I never thought McConnell could give a hoot about the wall. Time author Phillip Elliot writes:

McConnell recognizes things are getting bad. Personally, he is indifferent to the necessity of the wall, which Trump promised during the campaign, but he recognizes the politics of it can be helpful for firing up the GOP’s hardline base. In 2020, McConnell’s fellow Republicans will be defending 22 seats, and many of them are in states that may prove tricky, like Arizona and Colorado.

Let’s assume McConnell, whether he uttered these word or not, does think that things are getting bad.

Let’s do a little parsing of the four words above:

Things:

Is this merely the government shutdown or does the word mean the aggregate accumulation of Trump’s outrageous behaviors. This behavior includes but isn’t limited to his infantile outbursts. Some of these merely prove to anyone who has any sense that he is unqualified to be president. More important though, others are decisions made on impulse through a Tweet. Some of these have had to be walked back by officials who actually had information about the subject he thinks he’s an expert on?

What else would be on McConnell’s list of “things?” Perhaps, oh say, 10% of the 7,000 times Trump has lied? That’s 700, but say he’s bothered by only 1% of the lies The Washington Post – a newspaper no doubt he and everyone in Washington reads every day – has called him out on. This is 70 lies.

Could McConnell be troubled by knowing that many of the words used to describe Trump suggest that he is mentally ill and even if he wasn’t he is unfit to be president. In September 2017 a poll listed the 10 most common words used to describe him were “incompetent,” “arrogant,” “strong,” “idiot,” “egotistical,” “ignorant,” “great,” “racist,” “asshole” and “narcissistic.”

This is from Time Magazine (May 10, 2017):

What do the words idiot, incompetent, leader, and liar all have in common? According to a new poll, they are some of the first words that come to many people’s minds when thinking about President Donald Trump.

A new Quinnipiac University survey of 1,078 voters across the nation has found that words like incompetent; liar; leader; unqualified; president; strong; businessman; ignorant; egotistical; and asshole are some of those most commonly associated with the president.

I assume that if a poll were to be conducted today words like corrupt and even treasonous would be on it.

Are

For the grammarians, “are” is the present tense of the word be.

This should be easy. Things are only getting bad now? He must have realized that things were bad months, perhaps a year ago. If not, I am tempted to say he was like an ostrich with his head in the sand (resisting a turtle simile).

Getting

Continuing with my parsing, “getting” means entering or reaching a specified state or condition. In this sentence it refers to “bad.” It means that “things” or to elaborate “the situation with Trump” are in the process of entering or reaching the level of being “bad.”

Again, if McConnell thinks this is a new he is delusional, so let’s move on and consider just what does “bad” mean?

Bad

This is the fun part, fun that is if you enjoy watching zombie movies where the zombies win.

Bad presumably means Trump has become so irrational, so destructive of the norms of governing and treating his allies in Congress with any respect, that he has made McConnell’s job of controlling his own Senate Republicans precarious. McConnell has to be thinking about an insurrection among GOP senators facing a tough reelection battle in 2020 and a Romney revolt with the newly ensconced freshman Utah senator eying a run for president.

McConnell must be thinking about what the Mueller report will reveal. He and whether the next two years will bring a torrent of bad news for Republicans not only in the Senate but in the House and across the country as they watch public opinion shift inextricably in favor of impeachment. This could lead to a “throw the bums out” sentiment among voters.

He also has to be wondering about, to put it colloquially, just what the limits of Trump’s manifest and obvious craziness is. Aside from the threat of impeachment, the 25th Amendment solution always lurks in the shadows and emerges every time Trump’s behavior prompts his media critics and therapists who are members of the duty to warn group (among them yours truly) to try to sound the alarm that no matter what else anyone thinks about Trump’s agenda, he is psychiatrically unfit to be president, and that he is de-compensating (failing to generate effective psychological coping mechanisms in response to stress resulting in a severe personality disturbance) so much he is actually dangerous.

My message to Mitch McConnell is that you made a huge mistake in buying this president. You knew you were purchasing him warts and all but you anted the “all” and didn’t realize the “warts” were malignant and could at any time aggressively metastasize.

Mitch, it is time to admit it to yourself and figure out how to save face and take him to the return department and trade him in.

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Retired licensed clincial social worker, psychotherapist, and mental health center director. Was one of the first members of Dr. John D. Gartner's Duty to Warn group of mental health professionals warning publicly that Trump was a malignant narcissist and that his psychopathology made him too dangerous to be president.

It’s not like Republicans lose the Presidency if they Article 25 or impeach him. They have Pence, who could be just as effective as a Republican rubber-stamp in the President slot.

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